Family Counseling: Definition, Benefits, & Theories

Family counseling aims to address mental health issues experienced by one or more family members and improve mental health by changing how the family operates.

*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.

Early in my training as a therapist, I was assigned to work with a supervisor who specialized in family counseling. He was one of the most upbeat, flexible, and gentle people I had ever met—a true delight to learn from. The more I learned about family counseling, the more I realized that his interpersonal style was central to his effectiveness as a family counselor. Unlike many family counselors who work in schools, he worked in private practice, meaning families came to him of their own accord for help.

Those families were not in good shape. Communication had broken down and emotions grew hot quickly—the energy in the room suggested that things could boil over at any moment, and they often did. My supervisor’s gift was being able to stand in the middle of that firestorm and maintain not just his composure but his sense of hope and possibility for the family. He would align himself with each family member, explain why their family dynamics made sense, and gently guide them toward better ways of relating.

This training experience taught me that family counseling was too complex and challenging for me, but I retain a deep respect for anybody who steps into the roiling waters of family counseling. Let’s look at what family counseling involves and how it helps families heal.

Before reading on, if you're a therapist, coach, or wellness entrepreneur, be sure to grab our free Wellness Business Growth eBook to get expert tips and free resources that will help you grow your business exponentially.

Are You a Therapist, Coach, or Wellness Entrepreneur?

Grab Our Free eBook to Learn How to
Grow Your Wellness Business Exponentially!

✓ Save hundreds of hours of time ✓ Earn more $ faster
✓ Boost your credibility ✓ Deliver high-impact content

What Is Family Counseling? (A Definition)

Family counseling, whether delivered through a school or in a private practice, possesses several defining characteristics (Smith et al., 1995). First, it sees the family as a system, consisting of intersecting and interacting parts. Family members do not exist in isolation. Each of them has some level of connection with every other member, and those connections are worth exploring in detail to see how they might contribute to the family’s challenges. Oftentimes, the challenges exist because family members have very different ideas about how best to maintain those connections.

Second, family counseling sees the family as a system within, or interacting with, other systems. Families typically live in a neighborhood within a town or city; they have relationships with neighbors, teachers at school, coworkers, fellow churchgoers, or the local police, among many other possibilities. Each of the systems these people represent—a faith community, a school, a workplace—influences the family system. For example, the disciplinary actions taken by a school, or the expectations for proper conduct promoted in the family’s church, might cause conflict within the family. Perhaps a parent’s long work hours fray their connections with their children, or neighbors complain about how the family’s children play outside.

Family counseling, therefore, is therapy that aims to treat individual- and family-level issues at the level of the family system and where that family system interacts with other systems (Smith et al., 1995). Accordingly, it uses counseling methods that focus on the individual or the family, as well as trying to intervene in the systems that influence the family.

Benefits of Family Counseling

One of the chief ways that family counseling can be helpful is that it can change abusive or neglectful patterns in the family (Carr, 2014). Sometimes family members have fallen into deeply ineffective and damaging patterns of interaction, such as when parents see no option for maintaining discipline in the household other than to repeatedly hit their children. Family counseling can help parents and children meet all of their needs—say, for independence and for order—at the same time, without resorting to violence.

The importance of this kind of intervention cannot be overstated, as family dysfunction is at the root of many subsequent individual mental health issues, such as eating disorders, anxiety and depression, and later substance abuse (Carr, 2014). For example, parents who closely supervise and critique their children’s eating habits may be motivated by a desire to raise healthy children, but they may also be causing their children to develop behaviors associated with eating disorders.

Family counseling is also often delivered in school settings, such as through school counselors or guidance counselors. Family counseling provided this way can help with family communication and lead to greater satisfaction with overall family life (Kelchner et al., 2020). In research with families that have gone to family counseling, the family members make it clear that family counseling helps by identifying strengths of the family and individual members, highlighting the ways that family members’ actions are logical attempts to get their needs met, and showing unconditional positive regard for all family members, regardless of their behaviors (Sackett & Cook, 2022).

All-Access Pass - Wellness PLR Content Collection

Examples of Family Counseling

I worked briefly in a family counseling role with one client and her parents. My client was a nine-year-old girl with some learning challenges and a fair bit of anxiety. Her family system made dealing with those learning challenges and anxiety far worse: Her parents fought constantly about the right way to structure her day, get homework done, and provide discipline. Although they claimed to have her best interests at heart, they were much more invested in proving each other wrong than listening to their daughter.

Our family counseling approach was to give each family member a chance to articulate what was important to them and what they were trying to achieve. The parents had to learn to honor their daughter’s need for independence and her need to learn from her own mistakes; they also had to learn how to balance their need to feel in control with their desire to have an optimally functioning daughter. It was hard going, with lots of strong emotions and accusations flying back and forth. It taught me the power of family counseling and gave me a humbling lesson in what my strengths are and aren’t as a therapist.

If you are curious what family counseling looks like in action, I recommend watching the video below. Although it is a role-play, with actors rather than an actual family, it captures the essence of how a family counseling session would play out.

Video: Family Counseling Role-Play

Family Counseling vs. Therapy

Family counseling and family therapy are almost interchangeable terms—they mean pretty much the same intervention (Goldenberg et al., 2017). That said, some people use the term family counseling, in distinction from family therapy, to emphasize that the intervention is not limited to traditional talk therapy but can also include the kind of systems-level interventions often employed by, for example, clinical social workers. Also, you may find that people educated as counselors will refer to themselves as family counselors, while people educated as therapists will call themselves family therapists. Most of the time, their training has been much the same and they are offering pretty much the same services.

Family Counseling Activities

A classic family counseling activity is the genogram (Smith et al., 1992). In this activity, an individual or family works together to visually represent the different generations of the family, usually going as far back as the grandparents of the oldest generation involved in therapy. The goal of the genogram is to get the lay of the land: Who has been involved in family life? Where were the most positive or negative relationships? Talking these points through can be a useful starting point for understanding the bigger picture of a given family.

A similar, but more focused, activity is the family floor plan. In this activity, the parents in the family might draw maps of their childhood homes. Just as a genogram starts to reveal connections between people across generations, the family floor plan can point to important ways that parents learned how families work when they were growing up. Did family members get lots of physical space from each other, or was everybody up in each other’s business? The answers might explain some of how the family in therapy operates today.

Family Counseling Theories

Family counseling theories go by many names, but all share a focus on the family as a system, operating within or in interaction with other systems (Goldenberg et al., 2017). They take the theoretical stance that it is far more effective to view an individual as existing within social systems. For example, I am not simply an employee who does research. To understand anything about me as a worker, you need to understand the research team I’m part of. But to really understand me as an employee, you need to know how my home life is, because I probably bring some of it with me to work.

Another implication of this theoretical approach is that no behavior happens in isolation (Sprenkle et al., 2013), even those we would generally think of as so positive that they shouldn’t have consequences. For example, if a husband goes off to inpatient treatment for his alcoholism then returns home sober and stays that way, shouldn’t that just be an all-around win? Yes, in theory, but not if his wife derived a lot of purpose in life from trying to keep him sober and his children were accustomed to minimal supervision because mom and dad were focused on dad’s drinking. Family counselors know that even positive changes shift the whole system around.

Well-Being PLR Courses - Grow Your Business Fast

Family Counseling Methods

Let’s look briefly at what family counseling methods look like for school-based family counseling (Soriano et al., 2013). In this setting, in addition to working from a systems focus, a family counselor tries to build a partnership with the child’s parents, thinks about ways to advocate for the child in the other systems they exist in, and even tries to change how the school functions to better serve the child.

Family Counseling for Divorce

Family counseling can be enormously helpful for families with high amounts of conflict between the parents. These families often have parents with very different agendas—one wants to keep the marriage going, while the other wants it to end (Doherty & Harris, 2017). In discernment counseling, parents end up choosing between three options: letting things be, splitting up, or taking divorce off the table and trying in earnest to heal through therapy (Doherty & Harris, 2017).

This kind of counseling, which borders on couple’s therapy, nonetheless keeps the good of the other family members in mind, and it has been shown to help parents do a better job coparenting after the divorce is finalized (Emerson et al., 2021). This may be because the family counselor has helped the parents find a solution in which they can recognize that their mutual interests are served.

For families that are already divorced, family counseling can also help children make sense of what has happened in their family, ultimately avoiding situations where children blame themselves or end up estranged from one parent (Chen et al., 2021). It is unrealistic to expect families of divorce to have minimal to no conflict; instead, the goal of family counseling is to help divorced parents find an effective amount of connection with each other while minimizing the extent to which they draw their children into their conflicts with each other (Lebow & Newcomb Rekart, 2007).

Well-Being PLR Article Packages - Grow Your Business Fast

Articles Related to Family Counseling

Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Family Counseling

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Family Counseling

As I said at the outset, being a family counselor is not for the faint of heart. Neither is going to family counseling as a client! Family counseling works best when each family member involved knows they are being heard and valued—at least by the therapist to start, and eventually by all their family members too. This takes a highly skilled and patient family counselor, like the psychologist I introduced you to at the start of this article.

If you are considering seeking family counseling, I recommend thinking carefully about whom you want to involve in it and how you want to invite them to come. What can each person gain from coming to therapy? Don’t worry if what they probably want conflicts with what you want in some way—it’s the job of the family counselor to help you both understand each other and find a mutually satisfying solution. Have patience with the process, but also know that if the family counselor cannot keep your family relatively calm and regulated during sessions, or has a hard time connecting with each family member, you might be better off with a different counselor.

Don't Forget to Grab Our Free eBook to Learn How to
Grow Your Wellness Business Exponentially!

References

Carr, A. (2014). The evidence base for family therapy and systemic interventions for child-focused problems. Journal of Family Therapy, 36(2), 107–157.
Chen, S. Y., Roller, K., & Kottman, T. (2021). Adlerian family play therapy: Healing the attachment trauma of divorce. International Journal of Play Therapy, 30(1), 28–39.
Doherty, W. J., & Harris, S. M. (2017). Helping couples on the brink of divorce: Discernment counseling for troubled relationships. American Psychological Association.
Emerson, A. J., Harris, S. M., & Ahmed, F. A. (2021). The impact of discernment counseling on individuals who decide to divorce: Experiences of post‐divorce communication and coparenting. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 47(1), 36–51.
Goldenberg, I., Stanton, M. & Goldenberg, H. (2017). Family therapy: An overview. Cengage Learning.
Kelchner, V. P., Campbell, L. O., Howard, C. C., Bensinger, J., & Lambie, G. W. (2020). The influence of school-based family counseling on elementary students and their families. The Family Journal, 28(3), 273–282.
Lebow, J., & Newcomb Rekart, K. (2007). Integrative family therapy for high‐conflict divorce with disputes over child custody and visitation. Family Process, 46(1), 79–91.
Sackett, C. R., & Cook, R. M. (2022). A phenomenological exploration of client meaningful experiences in family counseling. Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation, 13(2), 116–133.
Smith, R. L., Carlson, J., Stevens‐Smith, P., & Dennison, M. (1995). Marriage and family counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 74(2), 154–157.
Soriano, M., Gerrard, B., & Adler, A. (2013). School-based family counseling: An overview. In B. Gerrard & M. Soriano (Eds.), School-based family counseling: Transforming family-school relationships (pp. 2–15). Institute for School-Based Family Counseling.
Sprenkle, D. H., Davis, S. D., & Lebow, J. L. (2013). Common factors in couple and family therapy: The overlooked foundation for effective practice. Guilford Press.
Smith, R. L., Stevens-Smith, P., & Gladding, S. T. (1992). Family Counseling and Therapy: Major Issues and Topics. ERIC Counseling and Personnel Services Clearinghouse, University of Michigan.

Are You a Therapist, Coach, or Wellness Entrepreneur?

Grab Our Free eBook to Learn How to Grow Your Wellness Business Fast!

Key Articles:

Content Packages: